Text images might not be a masterpiece of visual art but very often they also need correction – even more than scanned photos, for example. This might sound like a paradox but if you have dealt with text images that have light fonts on a dark background or tiny dots all over them, then you know what the story is about. Usually such images get their nonstandard colors in two ways – either because the scanner/camera did not get them right, or because the original itself was very bad. But in any case, if you want your text images to look professional, you can’t leave them with dots and unreadable fonts.
There are several approaches to repairing nonstandard colors of text images. The first approach is to fix them manually. You open the file, grab the eraser and the paintbrush and start fixing them. This is applicable if you have a couple of images only and the damage is not so severe – i.e. you have to erase a dot here and there. But if you have hundreds or thousands of images to fix, or you need to change their background, then fixing them manually is a mission impossible. In this case you need software to help you with the task.
There are many image processing programs that can help you deal with nonstandard colors in text images. One such program is ImageConverterPlus. It is the perfect choice for batch processing because it allows to make your own profiles, which you can apply on many files at once. Automation is key and you will soon discover that it is much easier to replace the problematic colors at one go than to have to do it manually.
When you are using an image processing program to fix nonstandard colors of text images, you basically select the problematic color and then you tell the program to replace it with another color. So, if you have a dark green background and light green letters, you select the dark green background, then tell the program to replace the dark green color with white and that’s it. If your background color is not compact – i.e. there are several different shades of dark green, you repeat the operation for each shade. When you are done with the background, do the same for the letters, save the settings as a custom profile, run it on all your files and the problem with the nonstandard colors of text images is solved.
One variety of text images that you will often deal with are screenshots. It is very unpleasant to see a manual in which each screenshot of the same application is in a different shade of gray because each screenshot has been taken either on a different computer, or on the same computer but with different settings. As with the other text images, the easiest way to unify all the backgrounds is by replacing their differing shades of gray with only one shade. ImageConverterPlus can help you with this task as well, so if you haven’t downloaded it yet, do it now.
Author: Ada Ivanova